Whom would arssers support at a Sep caucus - some members may even be attending - if forced onto the Democrat ticket? There were amusing lemon faces in the Clinton camp after Iowa. Even the women abandoned Hilary for Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

Barack Obama understands exactly the powerful thread of historical redemption for America that is wrapped up in his campaign. Indeed in his stirring victory speech he called his win "a defining moment in history".

This would sound ridiculously self-important coming from any other candidate. But every American understands intuitively what he's talking about; he extends America's tragic narrative of slavery and segregation and discrimination and converts it into something hopeful, something that announces that we are, finally, becoming a different and better country.

Early days, of course. But has Bush driven America so far to the left that ground is now open even for the non-liberal left? Could the Seps really elect a black President, whose middle name is Hussein, later this year?

fcuking petty of them if they dont just because his middle name is hussein, but then again it is the bloody septics, And if they elect nanna clinton she will die before her term is up, nothing worse than a women with power.

Plus the fact that the US right of centre probably hates uppity women even more than uppity blacks. With a black you can keep him the other side of the railway tracks, exclude him from your childrens school (usually), stuff him into jail, get him killed in the army, etc.

But even jocks have mothers. So an uppity female is much more threatening. Presumably Obama's advisors know this and will play on it. But its an interesting political phenomenon: how racism goes less deep than women-hatred.

Behind all of this there surely lies something else. Many mainly middle-aged and elderly Democrats see the 2008 election in almost Manichean terms. They don't merely want to send a Democrat to the White House. They want to get their own back on the Republicans for eight years of George Bush. They want to be vindicated at last for their past sufferings. And although not unaware of the Clintons' failings, they find it all too easy to set these failings to one side and are ready to rally behind Hillary as their generational avenging angel.

The problem for these Democrats is that so many of their potential voters don't actually think this way. These other voters - younger and more independent, and indeed more female - approve of bipartisanship and less polarised politics, but they see Hillary as a barrier to such an approach. They cannot wait for Bush to go, but they do not want to spend the next four or eight years refighting the battles of the Nineties or the Noughties. They are less invested in the Clintons. They are ready, in short, to move beyond not just the Bush years but the Clinton years as well. For them, Obama's relentless message of change and a new start - banal at times but eloquently expressed in his victory speech in Des Moines - resonates far more than another call to arms against the old enemy.

In a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly that reads very presciently post-Iowa, the libertarian conservative writer Andrew Sullivan expressed this dramatically. Obama's candidacy, Sullivan argued, could be transformational for America. It is the only candidacy in this contest that offers America the chance of calling a truce on the culture wars that have prevailed since Vietnam and on which every presidential election since 1968 has been fought out.

And if that is right, then the 2008 election may yet be a watershed. If it takes the form of a Clinton-Giuliani contest it will simply intensify the toxic cycle of the past 40 years and all the demeaning Ann Coulter-Michael Moore stuff that it spawns. But if it takes a less traditionally partisan form, especially in the form of a now not inconceivable Obama-McCain contest, American politics may at last be able to wrench itself out of the destructive confrontationism of the recent past. As I argued last week when discussing Ronald Brownstein's important new book, this is a prize massively worth winning.

Strange, isn't it? The idea of a woman (particularly that Clinton harridan) as President, or a black, or a bottom-feeler gives me the .303 depression/redmist again, but none of the candidates (Dem or Rep) would give me as much confidence as Condoleezza Rice in the post.

Actually Annakey, as a devout loather of anything PC I think your thread title offensive. Obama does not define himself as black, but as a talented individual wanting to work for everyone. Clinton would define herself as anything you want her to be so long as you vote for her.

Actually Annakey, as a devout loather of anything PC I think your thread title offensive. Obama does not define himself as black, but as a talented individual wanting to work for everyone. Clinton would define herself as anything you want her to be so long as you vote for her.

You insult all black chaps and all women. Shame on you.

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Consider yourself lucky, oh PC_Mushroom. I almost called it "Uppity Black or Raging Harridan?"

mushroom said:

Obama does not define himself as black, but as a talented individual wanting to work for everyone.

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Oh come on. I've heard him go on and on and on on national TV about his Kenyan father and Jewish mum. What's that if not "defining" himself?